


Lies to Children

by guardingdark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode: s05e06 I Believe The Children Are Our Future, Episode: s05e17 99 Problems, F/F, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 20:35:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6722401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardingdark/pseuds/guardingdark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Monsters aren't real," your dad tells you, again and again and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lies to Children

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE NOTE: this story contains depictions of and/or references to abuse, blood, body horror, death, disordered eating, gendered language, misgendering, possession, rape, religious themes, sexual assault, self harm, suicide, transphobia/transmisogyny, violence, and vomiting, similarly graphic to canon. Please utilize caution in reading.
> 
> Thanks to @justmyflawedlogic, @ravenreyamidala, and @twenty-one-poets for making this presentable. I'm @patrexes on tumblr if you want to talk, or, like, complain about this fic in a more public forum.
> 
> Happy birthday, Sam. I'm sorry.

1.

When you're three years old, you're in the back alley behind a bar in Apex, North Carolina, throwing up your dinner and a not insignificant amount of blood. Dean rubs your back as you gag, and you're crying and crying and even when there aren't any french fries left to come up you're vomiting blood and bile and little clumps of flesh.

You're taking big, sobbing breaths, gasping air like it hurts, and there's blood and gore dripping down your chin. "De," you say, "I don' feel good."

"Shhh," says Dean. "It's okay, it'll be okay. You're doin’ great, Sammy. You done coughin’ up your lungs on me?"

You nod uncertainly and try to stand, but you collapse to your hands and knees in the pool of blood and start retching again.

"Woah, woah, woah!" Dean says. "Sammy, _breathe_ , kiddo! You need to breathe!" Your dad's still inside the bar. That's probably a good thing.

"Can't," you choke out. "I..." You heave again, and all that comes up is stomach acid and blood. There's a lot of blood. "Ow," you say faintly.

" _Ow_?" Dean repeats, incredulous. "Are you-- are you okay now?"

"Yeah," you say. You frown at the blood on your hands like you don't understand how it got there. Dean cleans you up, promises you can have broccoli next time.

You don't eat french fries again for a long time.

 

2.

Your kindergarten teacher, the one in New Mexico who smells like safety and rotten eggs, she calls you special, says it like it's a good thing, like you're something amazing. Your next door neighbor in Arkansas, the one with the overgrown front yard with all of those cool bugs in it, she calls you special too, sneers it like it leaves a bad taste in her mouth, like it's dirty. That makes sense to you, more sense than how Ms Lyle said it. You feel dirty, not just because the house you're living in doesn't have running water, but like there's something inside of you that's not right, and you know deep down that it can't ever come clean.

 

3.

A girl you’ve never met before sits down next to you on the swings. It’s the fourth town you’ve been in this year already, and it’s only May, so this in itself is not strange.

“Hey, Sam,” she says.

You turn your head so fast your neck cracks on three different vertebrae.

“I just wanted to meet you,” she says, before you have the chance to say a word. “I mean, you’re our future on a plate.” And she pumps her legs as strong as she can, jumps off the swing. Lands it perfectly, with a little gymnastic presentation, arms raised, chin cocked back. Quarter-turn, and again.

She’s gone after that and you don’t see her again.

 

4.

You don't remember your mother, but Dean, he says she was beautiful. Your dad doesn’t talk about her at all, except when he’s drunk, and when he is, he tells you that you’re the one who killed her.

 

5.

The man sits down beside you on the front steps, bones creaking like the wood. "So, kid," he says. His voice sounds like he's been asleep for a long time and is just waking up. You guess that's true, in more than a few ways. It’s mid-afternoon, though, so the most obvious probably isn’t. He seems like the sort of person who gets up at sunrise. All of your dad's friends seem to be like that.

You don't look up at him; he's blind, anyway, it's not like it matters. You just keep playing with the toy plane Dean stole from the Goodwill last week. It's old and half broken and the paint, red racing stripes on a horrible mustard yellow, is peeling off, but you love it because he got it for you special, and also because it's new and the novelty hasn't worn off yet.

" _Kid_ ," the man snaps. You flinch and look up at him fearfully, but his face is placid.

You put the plane down beside you. "Yes, sir?" you say.

"You know why your daddy brought you here?" he asks.

It doesn't seem like he wants an answer much. "Yes, sir," you say, and you're stiff enough you don't flinch a second time, when he makes an angry sound in his throat.

"Come inside," he grumbles, "'s too damn hot out here," and so you follow him into the house, clutching the plane to your chest.

“Your daddy,” the man says, his voice echoing down the hall as he walks, “he’s not gonna tell you this, but he’s afraid of you.”

You make a sound in your throat. You’re in an open floorplan living-room-and-kitchen now, and everything is dark.

“Of course,” he continues, careful, careful, “you knew that, didn’t you, boy?” He huffs a laugh through his nose. “You’re awful perceptive.”

“T-thanks? Sir,” you add quickly.

He makes his way into the kitchen, opens the oven. “Want a chicken finger?” he asks. “You must be starving.”

You are, and you don’t know a way to tell him no, so he makes you a plate, sits down at the little table, four places and a dirty glass top and rusty metal legs that have been smothered in lead paint. Motions you to sit down too.

So you do, and you take a bite, and you choke it down. He’s blind. It doesn’t matter that you’re showing the pain on your face.

He lets you eat for a minute or two in silence, and then, “Salt’s pure.”

You say nothing.

“Lot’s wife, you know what happened to her, boy?”

You nod. Then, “Um, yes, sir.”

He laughs at the pause. “The Lord, he was cleansin’ the Earth of that sin. So he made her into salt.”

“Yes, sir,” you say, because you don’t know what else to.

He’s quiet again for a long moment, before he asks, “You like salt, boy?”

“Um. No, sir. Not really.”

More laughter. “I didn’t think you would,” he says, and then after that it’s a rush of motion and you didn’t know he could even move that quick but he has you pinned to the wall with a hand on your shoulder, and in his other hand he has a knife.

There are six inset light bulbs in the kitchen ceiling, and all but one of them are burnt out. He wouldn’t know if they were, and he’s not the kind of person whose rare guests would be pointing it out. Your dad said he was some kind of psychic. Wanted to meet you.

The single, dull light bulb flickers above your head, and then it explodes. You take the chance to kick at his leg and when he lets you go in his shock you duck under his arm to grab for the knife.  He lunges for you, and so you shove the knife into his belly and pull up as hard as you can. You run, and he does not follow. You sit back down on the front steps, and you start playing with your plane again. There's red flakes chipping off the wing.

 

6.

A girl you’ve met before sits down next to you on the front steps of a dead man’s house, wearing a body you haven’t. Her shoes squelch. She’s covered almost entirely in blood.

“I played with him,” she says, before you have the chance to say a word. “I hope you don’t mind.”

You shake your head.

“He wrote a little message on the cabinets,” she says. “‘KILL HIM’, all in caps. Like a murder mystery. I left it there,” she adds, off-handed, “is that okay?”

“I killed him,” you say.

“And you’ll kill more, I hope.”

“Did I kill my mom?” you ask her. “My dad, he says I killed her. But how could I have? I was a baby!”

“You’re special,” she says, and it’s the same way your kindergarten teacher said it. “We’ve wanted to have you for a long time. Will you come with me?” she asks.

“Where?”

“Home,” she says.

A black car turns down the road, coming towards you. She sighs. “Catch you later,” she says.

She’s gone after that, but you see her again.

 

7.

You steal your dad's journal, and that's how you find out everything you always knew deep in your gut had to be real, is. It's how you find out he hunts monsters. It's how you find out he thinks you might be a monster too.

Dean comes home with junk food, salt-filled and it’ll make your throat burn and you’ll be choking down your blood for hours when you do eat it but all you can do now is cry into his lap about monsters.

“Dad’s not gonna let them get you,” Dean says, and instead of asking what happens when he decides keeping you safe is too much trouble you just start crying, and anything Dean says makes you cry harder.

 

8.

The next morning there are stolen gifts under the Christmas tree--girls’ gifts, and that would be nice if you could believe it was intentional--and your dad never came home. You’re worried and thankful and you shove Sapphire Barbie into your backpack when Dean isn’t looking.

 

9.

"--can't trust him, Bobby," your dad says. His voice is hushed and urgent, like he's worried someone might overhear him.

"What do you _mean_ you can't _trust_ him?" Uncle Bobby sneers. "The kid's nine years old, what are you afraid of?"

"You know what I'm afraid of!"

Uncle Bobby sighs, and a cabinet door slams shut. You press yourself further into the wall. "Look, the kid's not normal, I'll give you that. But, _but--_! That's _probably_ because you drag him 'n Dean all over the face of the earth. He's _unsocialized,_ not a freakin' demon."

"You saw what happened to Silas, Bobby, nothing human could've done that! And what about that teacher of his, the succubus? She said Sam was special."

"I don't know _what_ happened to Silas, but you ever think that maybe you're playin' right into that demon's hand? She's a demon, John, all demons _do_ is screw with people."

"I can't afford to take that risk, Bobby!"

A pause. "I ain't helpin' you kill a child on the off chance he's the Antichrist!" Uncle Bobby says.

“Four hunters--" your dad starts.

“Four _shitty_ hunters,” Uncle Bobby corrects. “Anderson'd call a rickety staircase a haunting and you aren't actin' much better! Some flickering lights ain't any kind of proof, not in the sort of motels you stay in, and _neither_ is a kid having an imaginary friend. Sam's a weird-ass kid, hell, I’m man enough to admit he creeps me out, even, but he's not _evil_."

"But what if he _is_ , Bobby?"

Another pause. Longer, this time. ”What if you get the hell out of my house?"

 

10.

You don’t see Uncle Bobby again, after that. Your dad tells Dean it’s because of a difference in opinion.

 

11.

Amy suggests running away. “Let’s be freaks together,” she says, and you wonder if you’re really that obvious.

“I can’t,” you say. You’ve tried running before. He always finds you. He’ll kill her. You’re the only monster he’s ever spared.

So she catches a bus, alone, and you bury her mother’s body.

 

12.

You're lying on your back on the mattress in the shitty motel of the week, staring up at the stained ceiling, and your hands are fisted so tightly your palms are bleeding. It's the closest you'll ever get to having stigmata.

"Our Father," you say, and it catches, "who art in Heaven."

There's something in your throat.

"Hallowed be thy name."

You cough, hard. Blood and bits of flesh.

You force yourself to finish the rest of the Lord's Prayer. It feels like your blood is boiling in your veins. You think, drunkenly, of purity, and you pray the rest of the decade.

 

13.

Just after you turn nineteen, you have a shouting match with your dad over hunting and humanity and college and skirts and you walk out with a bruising cheekbone and you don’t ever come back.

 

14.

You've known Jess for months, so it's a surprise when she sits down next to you in your class on The Changing American Family--a social sciences requirement and, you hope, a resource, because you don't know what to say about your family that isn't alarming--and raises her hand when the professor calls for "Lee Moore".

"So _that's_ why you talk to me," you murmur.

She huffs a breath through her nose and smiles wide. She has straight, white teeth. It's a really pretty smile. "I talk to you," she corrects, pausing for the professor to call your name, "because you're cute. That helps, though."

You look down at yourself: you got your shirt from a thrift store, your jeans are torn at the knee because you haven't had the chance to patch them up yet, your sparkly purple nail polish is from the dollar store and chipping off. You've never really minded how you look before, but you know you're a far cry from "cute", especially for a girl who probably went on E in high school. You blush anyway, and accept the offer of coffee after class.

You talk about school while you drink overpriced lattes. She's biochem, and when she asks how you decided on pre-law and religious studies, you tell her about Pastor Jim, because it's true and because your deep-seated fears of total depravity and limited atonement are a little heavy for a first date.

It's the closest to normal you've ever felt.

 

15.

You’re hyperventilating on her kitchen floor at three in the morning, and you’re bleeding all over her tile.

“Shit,” she says, “shit, shit, shit, where’s the _fucking_ first aid kit?” They have one, Jess’ roommate is a med student, but Jess’ roommate also compulsively reorganizes everything when she’s stressed, and it’s the middle of finals week. You’re pressing a wad of paper towels to the bloody cut in your left arm and you’re dizzy but it’s probably not from the blood loss.

Eventually she tracks it down, hidden in the lazy susan with the spices, and she’s confused but you laugh, because of course the first aid kit would be sitting next to the salt and the bay and the anise, _of course_ it would.

“We should go to the hospital,” Jess says.

“No, no, no, no,” you say quickly. “Can’t afford it,” you add, and then exhale in the second cousin of a laugh.  “‘Sides,” you say, “I can do better stitches than ‘em, anyhow.”

Jess looks at you, a little concerned, but all she says is “Deep breaths,” and you try but everything is shuddery and kind of far away, and you’re talking, you realize, you’re saying shit you shouldn’t be, but you can’t stop.

“‘M not used to this,” you tell her seriously. “Usually people, people are trying to kill me ‘cuz I’m a _real_ monster.” You take no fewer than twelve breaths getting that out, and three of them are heavy gasps you weren’t planning on taking. You’re shaking. It’s like your body belongs to somebody else. “I didn’t,” you say, and what bursts out of you first as a hysterical laugh becomes sobs. “I know I’m a freak, but--”

Jess hushes you. She’s pulled the wad of paper towels away by now from your glass-and-asphalt-inflicted wounds, and tweezered out the sedimentary hangers-on. “You’re not a freak,” she tells you. “Those assholes weren’t right about you and neither was your family.”

That’s a guess. A good one. You haven’t told her anything about your family.

“I am, though,” you say. Your heart is slowing down a little bit, and so are your breaths. Jess pours alcohol on your arm. “Not, not like that,” you say, and somewhere in the back of your mind you realize that this is not the clearest way to say ‘this isn’t internalized shit, it’s just that I’m not human’ and even deeper the knowledge that you don’t want her to know that anyway, because she’ll leave for sure if she knows how dirty you are, how tainted. “I’m not good,” you tell her, because she deserves to know.

“You’re right,” Jess says as she tapes up the gauze, “you’re not good.” Your heart skips a beat. “You’re the very best, Sam Winchester.”

 

16.

“What would I do without you?”

“Crash and burn,” she says, and you do.

 

17.

A girl you’ve met before is hitching on the I-65. You haven’t seen her since Oregon, when you were twelve and she was Korean. She’s blonde, now.

“You could be some kind of freak,” she says, as if she isn’t, and when you meet up with her again, you don’t mention the blood stains on the hem of her shirt. You end up talking. Her story’s at least half bullshit, and so is yours, and you both know it, but it’s cathartic anyway, and honestly, coming up with your increasingly mediocre fantasy lives like it’s a competition is half of the fun.

This time, you’re the one who leaves, and you hope you’ll see her again.

 

18.

You save Max’s stepmother’s life, but it doesn’t feel much like a victory; he still ends up dead, and you’re just even more of a freak. “When Max left me,” you say carefully, “with that big cabinet against the door. I moved it.” And of course he doesn’t get it, so you say “Like Max.”

You don’t know what response you’re expecting, but he stiffens like there’s a monster breathing down his neck and says “Oh. Right,” and then shoves a spoon at your face.

Because deflection solves everything. Just go to Vegas and pretend like he’s not afraid of you.

 

19.

A girl you’ve met before sits on your lap. You’re tied to a column in an abandoned building in the West Side of Chicago and you can’t quite maneuver the pocket knife clipped inside the waistband of your jeans.

“I think we both know how you really feel about me,” she says into your ear. You jerk away but there’s nowhere for you to go and you make a snide remark you hope comes off as disaffected and _oh god, Dean is watching_ and she grinds down on your pelvis and she wears a smirk as she mouths at your neck.

“Aren’t you a little whore,” she breathes into your skin, like a revelation. She rolls her hips into yours. “And so _well endowed_.”

She notices Dean cutting his way free and you feel ill but you’ve got your knife now and it’s your only chance. You knock over the altar and the daevas, they don’t take well to being controlled, and she’s a crumpled heap seven stories below.

She’s dead and gone, and you know in the twisting of your gut that you’ll see her again.

 

20.

“You think something like that works on something like me?” the yellow-eyed demon asks, wearing your dad’s skin. Dean’s face says he doesn’t understand what the demon’s implying. You get it, though, and you realize that means there’s someone listening, for sure, when you pray. They just aren’t doing anything.

The demon says he’s got plans for you. Maybe that’s why they’re not doing anything. You’re already taken.

You’re pinned to the wall now and no matter how hard you try, no matter how much he goads you, you can’t move the gun from where it rests on the table. You don’t know why. You’re angry enough.

Just another in a long list of failures, and now Dean is going to die.

 

21.

In a dying town, a rabid woman pins you to the ground and smears her blood on your wounds, and you are made no dirtier for it.

That night you pull the Gideon’s Bible from the drawer and read from Psalm 88, _thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth._ When you pray, it’s with tears in your eyes.

 

22.

“Dude, you need to stop moping.”

“We could have saved her,” you say. It’s been almost a week. You put the news on, yesterday, and the FBI were involved with the case by then. They’re working on several leads, they said. They do not currently have a suspect, they said. The theory is a serial killer with a pitbull and a penchant for really unnecessarily expensive weaponry.

“You know we couldn’t have saved her, Sam,” Dean says, tiredly. You’ve had this conversation about six times by now. “No way to cure a werewolf.”

Your lips twitch unhappily. “No way to cure a lot of things,” you say.

 

23.

A girl you’ve met before forces her way down your throat. She’s acrid and sulfuric and you can feel your chances of lung cancer exponentially increasing, not that it matters, and she gets into the base of your brain and reaches out from there, her grasp extending through your nervous system in a flash that feels like electricity and fire, and your full-body shudder shakes her control all the way down to the tips of your fingers.

Hey, Sam, she says, without words. What’s up. Your mouth quirks with an alien stretch of not quite the same set of muscle movements, and her oil-slick presence is heavy with malice.

You can’t move and you can’t speak and her weight on your consciousness reminds you of her weight on your lap but you can’t afford to freak out, not now, if there’s any way to push her out of your body it’s not going to be in the middle of a panic attack. There’s a way, you know there is; your dad fought through the yellow-eyed demon’s control. You just need to find the right angle.

She walks your body out of your motel room, Dean asleep on the other bed, and you’re smothered by the smoke. Everything comes in sensory flashes: in the house you break into to borrow their stove to brand yourself, the sofa is soaked in blood and piss and Febreze; your shirt sticks uncomfortably to your skin as that hunter’s blood dries; you take a long drag on a menthol and it feels like you’ve inhaled a tube of toothpaste and it’s trying to finish the job salt and holy water never managed; Jo’s body, pinned between you and the counter.

Oh, god, Jo.

Meg’s got you hard and mouthing at her neck and (so _well endowed_ ) you can’t stop her, there’s no pocket knife in the back of your head to cut yourself free of her control and you’re horribly aware that both you and Jo are completely dependent on a demon’s _mercy_ and--

Stop being such a fucking baby, she says in your head. I’m not gonna hurt her, much.

Don’t touch her, you wish you could scream, and amazingly, thankfully, you don’t. You knock her out and tie her up and then the next thing you know you’re baiting Dean into killing you and, god, he should. Neutralize you before the body that barely belongs to you can be used to hurt anybody else.

 

24.

(She’s gone after that, but she never really leaves, either. You look in the mirror now and you’re hyper-aware of your height and the breadth of your shoulders and every other threatening, masculine trait that never really bothered you before but now makes you feel sick. You wish you’d taken advantage of Stanford’s health coverage when you could have, or at least that you had any of _your_ clothes, but all of that went up in the fire and hunting’s not a world you can afford to be yourself in, anyway.)

 

25.

“Does this mean I have demon blood in me?”

Yellow Eyes laughs.

 

26.

You wake up from a long weekend in the afterlife with piecey memories of sharp objects and screaming and an overwhelming feeling of just having left Tucson, Arizona. There were, indeed, sharp objects and screaming the last time you were in Tucson, so it takes a little longer than it probably should for you to realize that you were dead, and that Dean signed away his eternal soul out of some selfish fear of being alone.

 

27.

The next year is pretty tense.

 

28.

Lilith pins you to the wall with that demonic telekinesis you’ve been steadfastly pretending you don’t have and presses her lips to yours. She tastes acrid and ( _stop being such a fucking baby_ ) you angle your head away from her but there’s nowhere for you to go and _oh god, Dean is watching_ and you wonder hopelessly what it is about you that everyone feels entitled to your body.

And then Dean’s dragged, kicking and screaming, to the grave, and somehow you don’t immediately follow.

 

29.

When Ruby rapes you, it doesn’t even come as a surprise.

 

30.

You don’t meet Dean’s angel until a month and a half after he’s back from the dead, and when you do, you’re more than a little starstruck. You manage, of course, to blaspheme in front of the angels, and then Castiel doesn’t know what a handshake is, but he doesn’t seem unwilling to touch you. An angel and the scum of the Earth in the same room and you haven’t been smote yet. Maybe, you think, you have a chance.

“Sam Winchester,” Castiel says. “The boy with the demon blood.”

And there it is.

 

31.

The angels don’t seem to understand that they have bodies and audible voices now. Either that, or they have no concept of subtlety. “The abomination ought to be neutralized,” says the angel sitting on the park bench. The specialist. Where the Host of Heaven gets off committing genocide but you’re damned for saving lives, you don’t know, but you can recognize you’re not in any position to start arguing.

“Our orders do not concern Sam Winchester yet,” says Castiel. “We will not take action regarding him”--and isn’t that a trip? Somehow you thought angels would be above being that petty, although you don’t know why--“until they have been given. Or do you wish to Fall?”

“Do you wish for the forces of Hell to prevail?” he responds. “The abomination has already perverted Creation; it cannot be trusted to follow the will of Heaven.”

“Nor, apparently, can you,” says Castiel. “Do not suggest such insubordination again, Uriel.”

 

32.

> Sam turned around to face me. His long brown hair hung over his eyes. He crossed his arms and looked down at the floor. “Um,” Sam said, “I’m just wondering how much you know.” He looked up, finally meeting my eyes. I was half-surprised to see them hazel, rather than a damning black or sickly yellow. “About me.”
> 
> “What do you mean?” I asked.
> 
> Sam looked, if possible, even more uncomfortable. He shifted again. “Um…” he said again. It was weird hearing him talk. Weirder hearing the false starts and sudden pauses and disfluencies. I always cut those out of the dialogue, before. And, I don’t know, I guess I always imagined the Antichrist, or whatever he was, as more self-confident. Like he wouldn’t have to say ‘um’. Now that he was standing in front of me fidgeting, he seemed a lot more human. It was kind of sad. I wondered if he knew what he was. “Have you seen visions of _me_?” he asked warily. “...When I’m not with Dean?”
> 
> “ _Oh_.” I realized what he was getting at. “You want to know if I know about… that.”
> 
> Sam winced. He looked away and then back at the floor. He pursed his lips. “You didn’t tell Dean,” Sam said. I could see the unasked _Why not?_ in his eyes.
> 
> I gave him a look I hoped was reassuring. “I didn’t even write it into the books,” I told him. He looked up at me hopefully, and, feeling terrible, I added, “I was afraid it would make you look unsympathetic.”
> 
> “ _Unsympathetic_?” he echoed.
> 
> “Yeah, come on, Sam,” I said, feeling frustrated. This wasn’t exactly rocket science! “I mean, _really_?” I continued, and threw the topic in his face. He didn’t flinch or wince, just looked a little more closed-off, maybe. Distant. “You’ve gotta know that’s wrong.”

“Some prophet,” you mutter, because you feel like you’re allowed to be bitter, and then, “Nice job making yourself antilegomena.”

 

33.

Her name is Cindy. You keep telling yourself that, over and over in your head: _her name is Cindy, her name is Cindy, her name is Cindy_ , like remembering that she’s a human being and not just a show being put on by the demon behind her eyes will somehow absolve you of the sin of killing her.

“We don’t have all day, Sam,” Ruby says. “I mean, unless you want the Devil to go free…”

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.” And you slit the demon’s throat. Cindy’s throat. It’s Cindy McClellan whose neck you’re latched onto like every bit the vampire Dean told you you were, and it’s her drained corpse you let fall unceremoniously to the ground when you’re finished with her, and she’s not the first human being you’ve killed, not by a long shot, but you know this is the one you’re never coming back from.

 

34.

And then the Cage opens.

No, that’s a little too passive. Then you open the Cage. You wish you could say that you honestly couldn’t have seen that coming, but, really, when has anyone _not_ lied to you? Why should _this_ have been the exception?

So the Devil walks the Earth. And it’s all your fault.

 

35.

You’re afraid to go to bed, and Dean doesn’t want you back, so you mainline espresso and research the end of the world. Bobby keeps referring to “an obscure version of Revelation”, and you’re not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but from what you know thanks to the angels and what’s already happened, you can piece things together from Joel and Zechariah; from Baruch 2, Isaiah, Daniel, and Sefer Zerubavel; from Esdrae liber quartus Arabice, 4Q246, the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, Hazon Gabriel, and from the canonical Revelation of John of Patmos. It’s not like you have much else to do, anyway.

This motel isn’t nice enough to have complimentary wi-fi--the front desk doesn’t have a computer at all, from what you can tell--and at this time of night none of the coffee shops are open. You can always count on the Gideons, though. Rubbing your eyes with the palm of your left hand, you open up the KJV that rests next to the room’s phone to the end. _I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH._

You mark her down as a maybe, and try not to fall asleep.

 

36.

You’re sitting on the edge of the bathtub with your favorite gun, the one with the mother-of-pearl, because you figure you can at least be courteous to the motel staff and not make them replace the bedding and repaint the walls. _And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life._

You put the barrel in your mouth; you fire. You wake up with a hell of a headache.

 

37.

In Alliance, Nebraska, you meet a child antichrist, and everything starts to make sense. You wonder how many people, how many innocent human beings, were caught up in your personal vision of reality and killed because of it.

You guess it’s too late for it to really matter now.

 

38.

Castiel shows up drunk off his vessel’s ass and calls Leah Gideon the Whore, staring at you as he does. He continues to lie, misquotes Scripture, and you frown.

“What are you doing?” you hiss at him, when you get a second away from Dean. “She’s the False Prophet, isn’t she? The beast coming out of the earth.” You shake your head. “Blue Earth, Minnesota. It’s almost funny.”

“I...considered it best that he not know,” Castiel says slowly. He frowns at you, and tilts his head. “How did you--?”

“I’m occasionally competent,” you tell him. “ _And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus_. Hell of a technicality, that definition of martyr.”

“It is for the will of Heaven that they are as they are, and as such, they are martyred.”

You scoff. “Will Dean even be able to kill her?”

“I will give him Palo Santo,” Castiel says. “She is simple to kill.” And he disappears.

 

39.

You kill yourself again. You don’t have any cypress stakes on hand, so you use the Colt, this time. It is equally unsuccessful.

 

40.

Oh, Sam… Haven’t you realized yet? You’re mine. You’ve always been mine, since before you were even born. You were _made_ for me. My little Whore, whether you like it or not, and don’t pretend like you haven’t lived up to your title.

Just say ‘yes’.


End file.
